Julie Peters

There is something different about working with someone who has spent a lifetime in real estate. Julie Peters is the Principal Broker and owner of Island Boutique Realty, Inc., a boutique brokerage serving Hawaii Island, and a fourth-generation real estate professional with more than 35 years in the business. She has been licensed in Hawaii since 1992 and has also held licenses in California and Oregon.

For Julie, real estate is not simply a career. It is part of her family's story. Her ancestors trace back to the buying and selling of Manhattan Island, long before there were real estate groups or organizations, and she began her own love affair with the industry in the mid-1980s working for both her father's Beverly Hills firm and her mother's Big Island group. That inheritance is why she leads Island Boutique Realty on the belief that inspired the brokerage itself: that exceptional representation should still feel personal.

She works throughout Hawaii Island, with particular knowledge of Waimea, Waikoloa, the Kohala Coast, Mauna Lani, Mauna Kea, Kona and West Hawaii's resort communities, and her practice covers luxury and resort properties, primary residences, second homes, condominiums, land and investment property. She holds the Certified Residential Specialist, Accredited Buyer's Representative and Resort and Second-Home Property Specialist designations, which is an unusually complete set for this market and reflects the three things she is asked for most often. Her approach is not defined by a price point: whether she is representing someone dreaming of retiring to Hawaii from far away or a buyer purchasing their first home on the island, she believes good representation begins with understanding the person, the property, and what actually matters in the transaction.

Knowing Hawaii real estate also means understanding the differences between its communities. Life in Waimea feels very different from life along the Kona Coast, and a condominium inside a Kohala Coast resort raises different questions from a home in an established residential neighborhood. Second homes, vacation properties, oceanfront residences, ranch acreage and investment property each carry their own considerations, so Julie helps her clients understand not only what they are buying or selling, but the lifestyle and the community that come with it.

Being the Principal Broker and owner adds another layer to that. She is not simply selling real estate inside a brokerage, she is responsible for the brokerage, so contracts, negotiation, disclosure, market strategy and risk management get the same attention as presentation and marketing, and the details behind a transaction are treated as carefully as the ones in front of it. She carries her own clients' sales while mentoring the agents who work alongside her, seeing the big picture and orchestrating the detail of her own company at the same time.

She founded Island Boutique Realty around a straightforward idea: that sophisticated representation could be combined with the attention of a small, independent brokerage. It remains a small office by choice. The people who call get the person whose name is on the door, and the transaction gets the attention a boutique brokerage is able to give it. Exceptional representation, boutique service, genuine aloha.

Away from the brokerage, Julie is rarely still. Her highlights are adventures with friends and traveling the world, and much of that travel points back toward her three grown sons on the West Coast, whom she visits as often as the calendar allows. At home she is dog mom to Beau, her Goldendoodle and a fairly insistent presence in the working day. She is also a certified health and life coach, which began as a side interest and turned out to sit naturally alongside the rest of her work, since both come down to paying attention to what somebody actually needs.